A Monster’s Notes

by Laurie Sheck (Knopf; $30)

Rather as Michael Cunningham used “Mrs. Dalloway” in “The Hours,” the poet Laurie Sheck places Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” at the center of a varied and obsessively researched narrative canvas, encompassing such matters as early explorations of the Arctic Circle and the untimely deaths of Shelley’s mother, half sister, small children, and husband. The most successful set piece is an uncanny fable that portrays Frankenstein’s monster as an enigmatic but compassionate spirit who briefly appears to Shelley in her girlhood, takes umbrage at the violence of her novel, and survives into the present to observe the work’s long life in popular culture. Not all the digressions are equally gripping, but Sheck provides a provocative metaphor for spiritual and technological crisis: in the last pages, a being without identity cowers in a squalid room, hunting the Internet for a trace of its creator. ♦